Lara Hogan, Resilient Management (Book Review)
I've read a lot of books about managing people; this is one of the best. It's quite tactical and practical and is loaded with ground-level guidance about how to intervene with the people who report to you. But what is quite striking about the book is how it thinks about the different modes of one-on-one people management: The book draws shrewd distinctions between the quite different roles of mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring (chapter 2).
For Hogan, mentoring is when you advise. Coaching provides more freedom for the person being coached, because in the coaching role you want to ask open-ended questions and provide reflective comments that narrate where the coached person is. Why? Because you, as a coach, are trying to situate the coached person to grow without telling them what to do. This reminds me quite a bit of the "language protocol" which undergirds the Entrepreneur's Organization's "Forum" structure (the Forum structure asks you to share experience [not advise] and let people draw their own conclusions). This distinction between mentoring and coaching is really important, because for people to step up, you have to refrain from advising; you must create the context so that the coached person can choose her own path. Finally: Sponsoring is about situating/promoting people so that they eventually manage and lead. This is about providing grounds for recognition so that someone can be given or grasp new responsibilities. My only regret about the section on sponsoring is that it's so short (pp. 29-30). I think Hogan could write a book on this single topic (and she notes in passing that it is her favored mode of managing). I infer that she would teach us that if you have managers who are stuck in the same 1:1 mode (e.g., mentoring when it's time to move on to coaching or sponsoring), they may be stifling or blocking their reports.
As a manager, you really have to get your choice of approach (mentoring vs. coaching vs. sponsoring) right. I remember back when I started in academia as a junior professor, I suffered as the mentee of a self-nominated senior faculty mentor. It was terrible. I didn't need advice: I needed coaching. But the coaching strategy was completely beyond the capacity of the faculty member. It's been a sore point with me ever since.
Elsewhere, the book talks about getting your communications right. Hogan rightly says that if there is news that will likely be painful, you need to talk it through; email is not going to work. She recommends, then, a later recap email that sums up what went down (pp. 61, 70). Believe me, this is something that a lot of new managers get wrong: Hogan is helpful in suggesting techniques to get the messaging straight and coherent. The book is also quite good on providing reasons for "All Hands" meetings. Why do you do an "All Hands"? Well, it's because when you have big communications to share, you need to do it once so that everyone gets the same message. People wager that can drop the regular cadence of the "All Hands" meeting, but the risk there is that by loosing the repetition, you lose your ability for the "big news" meeting to be taken in course. I.e., w/o a sequence of repeated "All Hands" meetings, that one where you have to announce something tricky or potentially disruptive will itself seem like an emergency meeting: And people will over-react or be confused or just not get the message because it is presented in an exceptional venue (pp. 67-69).
I really can't praise this book enough: Besides the counsel on how to manage, the final chapter goes into the question . . . why are managers so tired all the time? And the book advises, surely based on the author's scar tissue, techniques for finding/developing a great peer network, learning how to prioritize but more importantly grade the everyday energy suck, and how to say "no" (83-95).
Note: One thing this book is not about is structuring teams, promotion ladders, and guidance for engineering team/process managers such as directors and VPs. For that, the author advises you check on The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change (my GoodReads review). The book also does not couple her ideas to engineering process, such as Scrum (by not doing that, I think the book may have a lot to offer non-engineering managers).
Originally reviewed on Goodreads on 29 January 2020.
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